On my final weekend on Maui, following the Waikamoi survey, I visited the Kahakapao Trail area of Makawao Forest Reserve hoping to find a few native plants to add to my galleries. The area is alien tree plantations with heavy weed infestations and wrecked soil. This mission was wildly successful beyond my expectations because I discovered a small area with a diverse set of native mesic forest plants. I descended into the big gulch after encountering the first helepepe trees off the trail, and waded through the ginger and weeds until I found some impressively large cyrtandra trees. After looking around this area I started seeing a number of native trees. I climbed the slope on the West side of the gulch and found an impressive array of natives among the weeds and plantation trees. Weeds such as ginger, lantana, lilikoi, etc were thick. The trees were mosty strawberry guava, guava, tropical ash, eucalyptus and other garbage. The soil was barren, hardpacked and covered with earthworm castings, or in the eucalyptus areas was deep with toxic eucalyptus leaves and layers of deadfall. Many of the native trees were obviously very old, so it seems that I found a dying pocket of the original native forest in this area. From memory I found: haiwale, huehue, hoi kuahiwi, 'ie'ie, maile, halapepe, koa, kopiko, kolea, 'alani, pilo, maua, hame, manono, holei, papala, papala kepau, opuhe, 'ohi'a, olomea, olopua, hapu'u, 'ama'u, possibly 'aiea, possibly 'ala'a, 'ala 'ala wai nui, and a number of native ferns. These were all located in a very compact area on the steep slope, and I could have easily missed most of them if I had not spotted the opuhe from below and decided to climb up and get a photo of it. It was quite an exciting moment when I first began to tally up the unexpected diversity of the pocket of native trees I stumbled upon in such a generally barren and weedy hell as the Kahakapao Trail area.

Birds were more plentiful in the gulch than on the Kahakapao trail above. They were thinly spread. In order of decreasing frequency I noted Japanese white-eye, northern cardinal, red-billed leiothrix, house finch, 'amakihi, i'iwi, hwamei, nutmeg mannikin and zebra/spotted dove.

I'll be working on posting the collection of photos I took over the next couple of days.